Batteries solve a different problem. They can smooth over daily shortfalls, but aren't so great when you have a week-long aberration. To fix that, you need significant overprovisioning or alternate means of generation.

That is, if you depend upon wind and wind is screwed up for a week... batteries aren't going to let you stretch limited solar all night long.

> To fix that, you need significant overprovisioning or alternate means of generation.

They have alternate means of generation... natural gas. There is a big problem with wells shutting down due to the same extremes which shut down wind. Which has caused shortages of natural gas which is doubly problematic because it's also used extensively for heating.

What do you do when your backup power is vulnerable to the same issues as your primary power?

It is arguably a fantastic example of where nuclear power excels. Particularly if you had a nuclear plant which ran well below capacity most of the time and ramped up when we have extreme needs.

> It is arguably a fantastic example of where nuclear power excels. Particularly if you had a nuclear plant which ran well below capacity most of the time and ramped up when we have extreme needs.

Right now that's awful, because most of the cost of nuclear plants is the capital costs. Paying a bunch of depreciation on something you don't use 24/7 is dubious.

Also nuclear tends not to ramp very quickly.

I'm pro-nuclear, but for nighttime base load + power-to-gas and filling other storage in the day.

I should have stuck to my main point which is that they actually did have traditional backup power which is also offline.

Do such nuclear power plants exist? I was under the impression that they provided consistent, baseline levels of power in most circumstances.

You can definitely ramp up and down power generation at nuclear plants. Whether that makes sense economically is another question.

Nuclear plants are OK at this. The current fleet in North America can ramp at about 5% per minute from 50% to 100%. (Between 50% and less gets very slow). There's also concern that repeated ramping could greatly increase the amount of maintenance required.

So, on the same order as a "fast" combined cycle plant and quicker than a older combined cycle ng plant. But.... pretty slow compared to the 4 minutes from 0 to 20% and 4 minutes from 20% to 100% for an open cycle gas turbine, and a fair degree of ability to react to "step" loads.

So, if nuclear needed to, it could help out in grid stability operations, but you really need something very fast like hydro or open cycle NG plants (or batteries) to do most of the work.

Hydro storage is gaining popularity. During the day, with over-provisioned daytime production, they pump water to higher elevation ponds. At night they let it flow down to the lower elevation ponds.

These could still freeze and stop becoming viable sources of energy, but they are a non-lithium source for energy storage. If they could be kept warm enough to flow in these conditions, they could provide generous storage capacity.

Yup, but most pumped hydro is relatively short term power storage, too.

You really want something like power->gas->power to help fill in on the worst couple weeks per year.

This battery is exactly the kind of backup infrastructure the parent was saying we need to account for, and and, to my sibling comment's point, an obvious submarine marketing blurb lazily "reported" by a news outlet.